Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 282: Setting boundaries late and junior joy

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Rafael asks, If you’ve already been working at a company for several months, how do you set boundaries with your employer as to when, time during the day, it’s acceptable for them to contact you? What can you say to your employer or colleagues if they expect you to respond to correspondence at all times, with a 30-min turn around? Can you adjust expectations after you’ve been working the role for several months, or is it too late? Hi, Do you see any benefits to being a junior developer? Any advice you would give to a junior, like “Hey, do this while you’re still a junior, once you’re a senior+ it might be harder to do or find time for it”?

it takes more than accidentally making your build process self-aware to be a great software engineer this is episode 282 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is the weekly advice show about all the non-technical parts of the technical field of software development i'm afraid i can't let you deploy that dave you thought soft skills was important for working with humans wait until it's important for working with your build system right when it won't let you back into the pod bay yeah you know it now has emotions and it's sad right it saw you looking at is it basil oh uh basil blaze the google one yeah yeah it it knows it's like it feels fear oh you googled basil huh

basil it's basil okay that makes sense that i would say basil then if it's basil do you know the word conch or conch yes the shell yes the shell i think i've said it many times on this show and certainly many times in real life and this week i found out it is conch not conch uh i reject your reality i say conch okay well oh google says both agreeing with dave is enough for me google told me conch it did when you press the little speaker icon it says conch but if you look at the phonetic alphabet below the word it's got conch and conch listed oh carry on well i can't read that stuff okay okay good i was right all along that's right i mean this is normally what happens when i think i have a brief moment of insight no no no i was already right that's right

You thought you were wrong, but you were mistaken. Yeah. Okay. Let's thank our patrons. Yes. We want to say thank you to those first-time contributors who contributed at the amount where they get one-time shout-out. That is Juan Carlos Jara Loaiza.

And then we have weekly shout-outs to Andrew Pollack, The Yeet Your Job Podcast, Avery Sturzey, Ian Walter, Arun Dunna, Kashakton, Ohio, Cameron Hall, Ira Chan, Monkey Face Emoji, Jonathan King, TestingIsDocumenting.org, Fizzbuzz Influencer. If you would like to join this crew, or just join our Slack community, or both, you can go to softskills.audio and click the Support Us on Patreon button where you can contribute any dollar amount that will ease your conscience for consuming this free content without paying for it. it is the time of year to begin doing good deeds because you stopped doing them for the whole rest

of the year the last you don't want to use up all that yeah you don't use it all up right now right just the last two weeks save it for december yeah there you go yeah and and a famously well known area of good deeds is to donate money to podcasters that's right oh it's okay if we don't actually want your money if you just feel guilty we don't want your money it's not gonna make you payment enough for us yeah that's right keep keep the guilt yeah we would rather have we would rather have guilty listeners than money in our pockets after all isn't that what we would buy with the money anyway that's right cut out the middleman i'm happy to report that the yeet your job podcast does not as of now appear to be a thing

so there's a market oh man i'm sure you could buy the domain corner the corner that market yeah do it and then acquire us eventually yeah okay should we read our questions yeah go for it all right this is our first question from a listener named rafael who asks if you've already been working at a company for several months how do you set boundaries with your employer as to when during the day it is acceptable for them to contact you what can you say to your employer or colleagues if they expect you to respond to correspondence at all times with a 30-minute turnaround. Can you adjust expectations after you have been working in the role

for several months, or is it too late? Hmm. Is it too late? So my bad pattern is that I work more the longer I've been at a job, and I never, not never, but it's, yeah, rarely do I pull back, right? i i start out with some amount of effort and input and then i feel like it just slowly grows over time so i can kind of feel this uh pain of of how do you how do you make your life more convenient in a way that the company might not expect you to yeah normally i quit right wait that's not a

character what do i do you adjust expectations after you've been working in the role for several once yeah i mean it's interesting you know we live in a day where it's harder and harder to know when you're at work and when you're not you know i don't know if you jameson you worked from home before it was cool before it was medically required right yes uh i i did as well but only for about six months before it was medically required five-ish years six issues i don't know Some amount of time. Did you find that in transitioning from office work to homework that it became harder for you to define when you were at work and when you were not? Absolutely.

Before, if I stayed late at work, it was a deliberate decision. It did not happen on accident usually. And it's much easier for it to happen on accident now or to come in early on accident because it's so close. Yeah. The commute was the gatekeeper. but the the flip side of that is that it's also easier for me to like turn off my notifications and take a nap during the middle of the day yes which would be harder to do in the office maybe unless i have one of those creepy pod sleep things right but people would know you're in there

that's true and yeah unless i didn't want them to ever be sure if i was in there or not so there would always be either a dummy in the pod or a dummy at my desk just to keep them on their toes it was just realistic enough that if you walked by the office and glanced through the glass you would see what looked a lot like a real jameson as long as you never tried to talk to me or interact with me in any way yeah the dummy can type on slack as well so it's fine if i found myself in that situation i would buy an infrared camera so that as i walked by i could consult the camera to know if you were emitting a 98.6 degree fahrenheit body temperature or not well the only thing to do is get some real human blood to fill that dummy up with you forced my hand

and a liquid heater and pump to keep i either need to kill one person or borrow a liter of blood from five people oh boy and that's how you adjust their expectations question answered the question is do you have five friends who are really committed to you do you have five friends who each have one extra liter of blood so i'll take them off your hands let me take that extra blood off your hands oh boy okay how do i answer this question now so i think the answer is it's never too late to set expectations for boundaries because things in your life may change like i got sick i had a child

i have a mental illness i mean there's just so many things that can change in a human being's life now is as good a time as any to set expectations about what your boundaries are so are you saying things can change all the time so therefore you will probably have something changed that you can tell people to not do this or just people are just expecting it's it's fine to be different at work than you were before i was thinking the latter but i like the idea that you can just wait for something in your life to change. So you have an excuse to bring this up. Look, I know I used to respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week within 30 minutes, but last week I got a flat tire on my car. And so now I'm only going to work eight hours a day. I'm looking forward to my first child for

a lot of reasons. And one of them is that I can now wait more than 30 minutes before answering a text yeah it's like it's like a health insurance where you have a qualifying life event yeah did i say life insurance i meant to say health insurance i don't know what i said no i think you said health insurance okay or if you said life insurance my brain turned it into health insurance well regardless i just had a lapse in memory of what i said which i think is a qualifying life event i need to call my boss okay i will no longer be responding to your emails ever effective immediately i will no longer ever respond oh boy what can you say to your employer or colleagues so i i imagine that this is not a

friendly to asynchronous communication culture if everyone expects an immediate or within 30 minutes turnaround at any time of day that that's the part that kills crazy to me like expecting a 30 minute turnaround during normal working hours doesn't seem too bad to me i mean depending on you know if you're getting if you're getting interrupted every 30 minutes it might be hard on your productivity but that doesn't seem bad but expecting it at any hour of any day that's bad what do you think about the very sophisticated strategy of just don't answer i don't like that why not there i just gave you an example

it took me a second to figure that out listen editors don't edit out that long gap that was deliberate okay or or you could you could just have like a let's see is this over text assuming it's on a a computer you can just have a snippet save that says i'll get back to this when i'm back at work if you have to answer right if they're like bugging you over and over and over again yeah i feel like that probably will ruffle some feathers the first few times you do it maybe this is like an emergency room doctor maybe we're looking at this wrong they're like yeah i gotta respond to these pages all the time don't they know i'm on my coffee break over here hanging out at the nurse's station

just chatting with everybody? Yeah, you're probably not an ER doctor, and it will probably wait until tomorrow. Let me just say that if there are any ER doctors listening to our show, I would recommend you stop immediately. The advice we give is probably life-threatening. Can you say to your employer or colleagues? So here is what I would do. I would say, okay, speaking of qualifying life events, I feel like you get several decades to use the pandemic as a qualifying life event. Okay. We're still deep in the middle of like,

I've been thinking and I'm going to do thing X because of the pandemic. So you can say I've been thinking a lot about my work-life balance. The pandemic has really shifted that. And I want to make sure that I'm fully present at work and fully present at home. So I'm going to have some stricter boundaries.

If there's an emergency, then here's how you contact me. If it's not an emergency, I'll get to it when I come in in the morning. And then if you tell people ahead of time and then do that a few times, I feel like that would probably work. I don't know.

I think so. And then I think if you want to armor up on this thing, the first thing I would do is I would build a coalition with a bunch of my peers to see if they're all on the same page about communication expectations. I'll bet you that a lot of your peers are on the same page with you and they are just as dissatisfied with it as you are. And then once you have that, I would bring it forth

with more of a unified voice to your leadership. And I would also say I would couch it in terms of why this is beneficial to the company. because it turns out developers who get interrupted every 30 minutes produce lower quality and lower velocity results and so if you if you all agree that there are non-interruption periods of time uh except for design you know like there's going to be a person who's responsible for responding to fires and things at different times of the week fine but but if you all agree that there are designated don't interrupt the team times of day i think

you'll get better output from the team. And I think you could sell that to leadership. Yeah. So that's more about focus time during the workday, even less about interrupting your non-working hours, which makes sense. Yeah, that's true. And that's another direction I think we could take this question is we could say, okay, let's assume that this is not about outside office hours. It's just about the 30-minute turnaround in office hours, which actually I think is a possibility. That's what the question asker meant. And that's how I would sell that the selling outside office hours response times that's easy you just say look you are paying me for you're not paying me for 24 7 support if you wanted 24 for 7 support i would

have negotiated about a double my salary because you're asking me to do like three times more hours of availability and you've already provided them a discount which is a good negotiation technique right so maybe they'll just say yes yeah exactly i just got a double pay raise all i gotta do is be available 24 hours every day every day of the week totally achievable anyway so yeah that's that's how i would approach it um is i would say look i think we should all establish a culture of whether you know what are our response time service level objectives internally so at my employer a few folks got together to try to address this problem we're about 30 software engineers right now. And we're kind of at this phase where meetings start to crop up if left untended.

And the schedules of engineers was getting pretty regularly broken up by these recurring meetings, not just one-off ones. And so a couple of folks got in a room and tried to design a calendar that grouped all the recurring meetings into a consistent time block sort of in the middle-ish of the day. And no other recurring meetings for engineers were outside of that time. and i was a kind of skeptical at first because i have low empathy and i thought well i'm in meetings all day so i don't care you should all suffer like i do yeah i i think it's just been too long since long periods of focus time were available to you i had low empathy that's the summary okay so you're just just to be clear you're not saying you had deliberately low empathy you

just didn't have the frame of mind that was i did not have the problem right i've i've gone to the dark side long just don't want anyone to think you're not an empathetic person generally yes putting the pathetic and empathetic it worked really well there was a little bit of hiccup there was a small number of hiccups there were some hiccups got it the third time because there were meetings that were pretty important to people and it took a little bit to kind of shake out what meetings we really wanted to keep and what we could shrink but i think we landed in a place where in general engineers have more focus time now and we have something we can point to to kind of defend it if it starts to get

reduced again does it help your team reduce the amount of uh interruptions knowing that there's designated time every day where you can all come together i think so yeah that's pretty cool there's still plenty of collaboration and people tapping each other on the shoulder to work together and answer questions but we used to have our meeting schedule used to be path dependent someone put a meeting on four years ago. And then three years ago, someone added another meeting that depended on what people's schedules were the week they added it. And it just turned into this unoptimized thing. I don't know how well that scales. If you're a super large company, then the answer is it doesn't. But if you have a small enough group or you can get enough agreement on timing

and what to cut, then that might be an option to try. Very cool. I agree. Have we answered the question i think so good luck go form a coalition and get your 30 minute response time increased to 35 minutes show up at 501 at their office right before they're about to leave or at their house okay do you want to read our next question dave yes i do okay we have a question from an anonymous listener who says hi do you see any benefits to being a junior developer any advice you would give to a junior like hey do this while you're still junior once you're a senior plus it might be harder to find time for it oh that's a great question the way i first read this question was do you see any benefits of being a junior developer because i think i want to go back to that

i feel like everybody has those thoughts sometime what if it was remember the the simpler days so here are the benefits i i remember from being a junior developer i had much better hair i had a better metabolism was in better shape my mind was more agile less prone to forgetting things and getting stuck i knew more about what music was popular in culture so these are all things that were fantastic about being a junior developer which may or may not apply to other junior developers you know it's not a universal experience, depending on when you started this career. Very true. I mean, the obvious one is write code. Yeah, you get to actually write code. Yeah, that was the time I wrote the most code in

my career was at the beginning. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I could write hundreds of lines of code a day back then. Yeah, and it was great. I also, one other thing that was really nice was, I think I've talked about this before on the show, to some extent, learning the popular technology of the day was easier because i didn't have any preconceived notion of how stuff worked so i'm trying to fit it in with is this a good idea or not it was just this is just how it's of course it's a good idea work it's new why else would why else would they have done it this way it wasn't a good idea i i totally resonate with that like you didn't have all this baggage of yeah i remember the last five supposed good ideas that burned me yeah now nothing is good

yeah so you're less exactly you're less jaded i think so enjoy being not so jaded and burned by someone else's alleged good idea that ruins your life well you're still a junior oh man here's one for you enjoy the time when you are solving problems defined by others with solutions defined by others man so much pressure off your shoulders to just do what other people say. Oh, it just feels so good. Instead of having to be the person to figure out the problems,

figure out the solutions, and then communicate that to other people, that's more of a senior role. Just be the one who gets to say, yeah, I'll do that. And then do the thing you're told to do. Mm, delicious. It's like a vacation.

Any advice you would give to a junior? Maybe this is related to your advice, but there can be lower expectations which can be nice sometimes and can make it easier separate from the less kind of baggage to work through to learn new things. There's also less of a cost

for you to switch on to something else. So you might get to play around with a bunch of different stuff. If someone is a deep domain expert in embedded systems, they're most likely not going to shift over to work on the front end. That's right.

You don't have the sunk cost fallacy working on you. Yeah. yeah which if you want to try a bunch of things can be beneficial if you do want to just focus really deeply on something i guess that doesn't work but it's nice to be exposed to a broad array of things when i was a junior developer i think it was about 375 years ago about give or take a few decades i had a lot of side projects and i think it's because i my work was just fun and i didn't feel a heavy burden or pressure i just enjoyed it and so i still had mental energy

before and after work where i could do fun side projects yeah it's hard for me to untangle that from kind of life changes and age but i definitely had the same thing of of was very excited about learning and building stuff at home it's been a while been a while since i've cranked out some home code home code it's like homeschool but for code i feel the same way like i think a lot of our answers are going to be tangled up with that it is hard to it's hard to divest the life stage from the career stage i saw a tweet the other day have you seen that image of mr rogers drawing and he says i'm not very good at it but it doesn't matter it's the fun of doing it that's important no matter how anybody says it feels so good to have made something he's drawing this like crayon

stick figure drawing and someone retweeted it and said engineering managers doing advent of code and that resonated yeah this might be bad code boy sometimes it feels good yeah don't judge my code what else would you do if you're junior um here's one you can get away with asking questions on basic concepts to more senior people that more senior people feel embarrassed to ask about. So leverage that by asking lots and lots of questions. Yeah.

Imagine my shame when I ask tomorrow, wait, it's not pronounced big ooh? Big ooh notation? But you, you will be seen as a go-getter. That's right. Eager to learn. That's right. Also, I think there's such low expectations on junior.

I just remember feeling like a hero as a junior developer when I got anything done. It was like, oh, you fixed the bug and you built a new thing. Like, way to go. You didn't just break it more? Right. Wow. Great job. So I would say kind of bask in that.

Low expectations, high delivery sets you up for feeling really good. And try not to take all of this to mean to feel dread about your future. Yeah, it's great. Lots of great things about being a junior. Lots of great things about being more senior. Yeah. Oh, there's another good thing about being junior is that your salary will increase at a rate that is higher than when you are more senior. So you can look forward to pay increases.

That's an interesting way of looking at being. i mean i guess it's not necessarily underpaid if you're early in your career yeah you definitely make less money though you make less but it moves up faster yes yes it does i mean maybe that's true i've seen some pretty crazy numbers yeah that's yeah once you're a senior plus it might be harder to do or find time for it okay here's one i think it is probably easier to just decide what to do and then do it well now that i'm saying this maybe i'm wrong no yeah i disagree with that i think uh you're more beholden to the opinions of others and you just kind of have to do things yeah you just have to do things the way the team does them or the way

your senior or tech lead tells you to do them okay that's true and you have less clout like you can't just chime in on a pr and be like change it to this way and have everyone be like right away you know you have to yeah it's hard that's actually there's a lot of challenges of being a junior engineer and i think that's one of them another advantage is you can you can job hop more as a junior developer and it's not frowned upon when i join a company i'm in it for years because i feel like the the kinds of impacts i want to make take a lot longer at this stage of my career than they do for a junior developer if i'm there i could stay at a job as a like let's say it's my first software job i could stay 8 to 12 months and then hop and try something brand new so you

can kind of embrace the variety that comes from being able to change jobs a lot when you're more junior yeah that's a good point or move teams too you know if you want to stay at the same job and have more variety another this might be related to your earlier point of low expectations but i feel like junior developers who seem to have a a high trajectory are are it's really fun to be around them right by the time you're kind of a senior developer if you're even if you're great there's some sense that maybe your your growth trajectory has slowed down a bit but just really early developers who you can tell are are great already as junior developers and will become even better it's really fun to be one of those so i guess i'm just saying it's awesome to be really good

it's not very helpful i don't think i was one of those but i've been around them yeah i don't know i'm out of things me too but this sounds like the kind of thing where we could have people chime in who have just yeah kind of completed the transition out of the junior moniker and and consider themselves a little bit more mid-level or senior i'd love to hear you know what are the things you miss because it's been a long time for me yeah i'm sure i'm forgetting cool stuff i've forgotten more about being junior than you ever do sunny uh this really has taken on a big old man yells at cloud vibe yeah back in my day uh okay well have we answered the question i think so it's uh it's good to be junior lean into it yeah good luck enjoy it yeah and you'll

be great at it yeah you of course you will i mean look at this question you asked it's amazing i mean i i have very low expectations for questions from junior engineers yeah what about other people that want to ask questions what if they want to check and see if they meet your low expectations all they have to do oh that was a beautiful tf sorry i'm like does he want me to answer oh you want me to tell people how to ask a question oh boy that was beautiful what very well teed up thank you let's just spend the rest of the show talking about how smooth of a transition that was to just wreck the transition tradition anyway if you want to ask your own question go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can

fill out our form and as always we want to express a heartfelt thank you to everyone who takes the time to write questions even the more senior engineers whose grammar we criticize quite sharply thank you to you for doing that and that's all i have to say about that and yes i'm a senior podcaster and i still can't get that out all i can do is say we'll catch you next week We'll see you next time.